Alphabetter Juice
Page 20
Let us turn to AHD, which says, “Over time, stressed vowels commonly become diphthongs, as when Latin bona became buona in Italian and buena in Spanish.” Ah. As so often, we are brought back to the mouth. Twenty-wun and gimme wun, or for that matter only wun, vocalize more smoothly than twenty-on and gimme on and only on. Beginning in Wales and the west of England, one’s pronunciation evolved, according to AHD, from on as in only to oo-on to woon to (around 1400) wun. According to Chambers, one was only occasionally spelled the way it was pronounced—the pronunciation wun “is first referred to by a scholar in 1701; earlier grammarians give to one the sound that it had in alone, atone, only, and the … suffix -one,” as today in acetone. By the time grammarians’ ears caught up, it was too late to change the spelling. (In certain other British dialects, one is or has been pronounced yahn and eena. See the wonderfully baffling rundown on eena, as in eena meena mina mo, in Anatoly Liberman’s Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology. He says that in Yorkshire eena is still used, instead of one, for counting sheep.)
That wasn’t the only way I found onesie provocative.
“What you doing?”
“Lying in bed.”
“What you wearing?”
“Oh, my onesie.”
Imagine my chagrin when I Googled onesies and found that a onesie was infantwear. You couldn’t tell that from the Times’s picture, which displayed the onesie, out of scale, next to a skull-motif bikini bottom. The accompanying story never mentioned the onesie. Come to think of it, I believe what first brought my attention to this matter was my impression that the bikini bottom was the onesie.
But okay, a baby thing. The snaps are so you can get at the baby’s diaper.
What kind of people put a grinning skull on their baby?
For that matter, WHAT KIND OF FAMILY NEWSPAPER RUNS A PICTURE OF A BABY THING NEXT TO ONE OF A BIKINI BOTTOM?
But wait. My wife tells me that a friend of ours, a grown woman, wears onesies. Adult sizes are getting harder to find, but she tracks them down. “That’s her underwear. I’ll ask her about it.”
“No,” I say. “Never mind.”
ooze
Is this a great word, or what? It didn’t happen overnight. Going back to Old English, attempts to capture it, as noun and verb, include wase, waise, woise, woyse, woze, woose, woes, wozy, oous, oes, owes, oase, ouze, owze, oose, owse, and oaze. West Frisian tried weaze. Something to be said for the w, which was abandoned in the sixteenth century, but it came in handy in the nineteenth, when O. Henry was the first to publish woozy. And we wouldn’t have wanted ooze to get confused with woo—as in pitching it, for instance. (Nobody knows where woo came from.)
Chambers relates ooze to virus. Neither OED nor any other source I have found is willing to suggest that there is anything sonicky about it. Come on!
Louis Armstrong on one of the pleasures of life at home in Queens, New York: “A Garage with a magic up and down Gate to it. And of course our Birthmark Car a Cadillac (Yea). The Kids in our Block just thrill when they see our garage gate up, and our fine Cadillac ooze on out.”
ouistiti
While looking at squ- words on OED (see squelch), I found, under squiff (a contemptible person), this quote from a letter written in 1939 by Ezra Pound: “that squiff, that femme ouistiti and lowest degree of animal life (apart from Cambridge Eng. profs).”
What in the world, I wondered, is a ouistiti? OED prefers wistiti and calls it a South American monkey or marmoset, named (as so often happens) for its call. Who first used wistiti in English print? Of all people, Oliver Goldsmith, in his History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1776): “Of the sagoins with feeble tails, there are six kinds … . The third is the Wistiti; remarkable for the large tufts of hair upon its face, and its annulated tail.”
What did dotty but sweet-natured Oliver Goldsmith (see Alphabet Juice) have in common with certifiably insane, fascism-loving Ezra Pound? Why would anyone use this monkey or marmoset as an insult? Because of its feeble tail? The game was afoot!
In OED I looked up sagoin and several other terms that arose in that connection, and all I learned was that Goldsmith was a pioneer mentioner of monkeys across the board. The marakina, the sapajou … It’s not that he was an expert on monkeys. Goldsmith was a man who wrote for a living. Aside from the aforementioned History of the Earth and so on, and his several abiding imaginative works, Goldsmith produced The Bee (essays), The Grecian History, An History of England in a Series of Letters From a Nobleman to His Son, The History of England, The Memoirs of a Protestant Condemned to the Galleys of France for His Religion, Miscellaneous Works, A Survey of Experimental Philosophy, a biography of a famous fop, and on and on and on.
I Googled ouistiti. The first thing that came up was a photograph of several beaming naked people riding bicycles, led by a woman with very large breasts. Do algorithms have a weakness for cheap -titi jokes? After that came photos of monkeys or marmosets looking much more elegant than the nude bikers. I couldn’t see that it would be so insulting to be called a wistiti. They’re not suspending themselves by their tails from trees, but they’re not sitting buck naked on bicycle seats, either.
I Googled on, and the nudists were explained. In France, to smile while posing for a photo, which the nudists were demonstrably doing, you don’t say “fromage.” You say “ouistiti.” In Pardon My French, Unleashing Your Inner Gaul, Charles Timoney writes that if you say ouistiti “in a flat English accent reminiscent of the cartoon dog Droopy, you will look thoroughly miserable,” but if “you say it enthusiastically in a strong French accent, the two last syllables force your mouth sideways into a broad grin.” Just like cheese.
A literary madman (fou littéraire) named Claude-Charles Pierquin de Gembloux theorized that people and animals originally spoke the same language. By way of rather oblique proof, he produced a glossary of words used by the ouistiti. For instance, he maintained that when a ouistiti goes “Irouah-gno,” it means (as Google translates, poorly, from Gembloux’s French) “I have a terrible emotional pain, save me, save it for me.” Whereas “O coco” means “terror deep,” and “Q uouéée” is a ouistiti’s way of saying “suffer with despair at what we can not escape.”
Then I found where Pound might have picked up the word. In his 1921 translation of Remy de Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love, we read that “the vagina is more or less closed by a membrane, which the male penis tears in first encounter, in … certain small monkeys, the marmoset, certain carnivore … The maidenhead is, therefore, not peculiar to human virgins, and there is no glory in a privilege which one shares with the marmoset.” The word Pound translated as “marmoset” in that distinctly unappealing passage is ouistiti.
From there the trail of Pound and the ouistiti got even less pleasant. Possibly the person Pound was insulting was Marcel Proust, whom he calls a ouistiti by name in another letter. Proust was gay (so the femme might be meant to apply) and half Jewish. In the thirties, shortly before being elected the first Jewish president of France, Léon Blum was beaten nearly to death by anti-Semites and called, by another French politician, “a ouistiti of the ghetto.”
The push-button Google translation of that politician’s diatribe is lousy, but the nastiness of what he called Blum comes through: “Grumpy Little Girl vivisectionism the early days of birth, marmoset ghetto of twit who is not even from us.” In ouistiti the polyglot Pound may have been resorting to a common French ethnic slur of the time. He was living in Italy, where he made pro-Fascist, Jew-hating radio broadcasts during World War II. He was captured by American troops, thrown brutally into a literal cage, charged with treason, judged incompetent to stand trial, and sent to a mental hospital for twelve years. After his release, he told Allen Ginsberg, in an interview, “The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.” Suburban, is it? Sub-something, anyway.
But it’s a pretty little animal (except in the squinchy, beady-eyed face), the ouistiti. A series of popular French children’
s books chronicle the adventures of a ouistiti (a mignon, or cute, ouistiti) named Sapristi. P’tit ouistiti is sweet to the tongue. So is ouistiti neutral? Only in the sense that sweet is. You can call someone “Sweetie” sweetly or meanly, and either way, the we/wee/oui/tweet/twee/teeny in there evokes a squeeze.
outdo
“You’ve outdone yourself” strikes me as a dubious compliment. An editor told me that once about a book review I’d written, which, to be sure, was deftly turned, but I had to wonder: Hadn’t he for God’s sake ever read the much better stuff I’d been doing over several decades? Also, to outdo myself would be to perform over my head, to reach a fortuitous level I’d be lucky to reach again. Wouldn’t it?
I am not usually this touchy.
ox
This strong, stolid animal might feel better about his loss of testicles, and his consignment to hard labor, if he knew that no other animal has everything (at least in terms of tick-tack-toe, football plays, and, yes, kisses and hugs) summed up so succinctly in its name.
p · P · p
This is one of the first alphabet sounds a baby can make, and you can tell it pleases the baby. No wonder it looms so large in the arts:
Pap, Huck Finn’s reprobate father.
Pep, Nathanael West’s nickname (because he tended to lack pep).
Willie Pep, the great featherweight fighter.
Pip, the hero of Great Expectations. That novel’s other memorable characters include Aged P., Mr. Wemmick’s aged father (the P is for Parent), who though stone deaf has a propensity for social cheerfulness. “All right, ain’t you, Aged P.?” Wemmick will ask the dad, who will reply, “All right, John my boy, all right!” Says Pip, of a meal with the Wemmicks, “We ate the whole of the toast, and drank tea in proportion, and it was delightful to see how warm and greasy we all got after it. The Aged especially, might have passed for some clean old chief of a savage tribe, just oiled.”
Then there’s Pip in Moby-Dick, the diminutive, jolly-bright black youth who can’t resist jumping into the water when they’ve got a whale harpooned, and goes eloquently mad. Why has no one rewritten Moby-Dick from his point of view?
Pop, let’s see, “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Pop Fligh, the retired ballplayer who becomes the adoptive grandfather of Dondi, in the old comic strip, remember? The rocker Iggy Pop, and, well, pop.
Pup, there’s Pupdog in Pogo, and Officer Pupp in Krazy Kat.
Then there’s Papagena/Papageno, Papa Hemingway, paper, Joseph Papp, Pappy Yokum, Bo Peep, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life.
Peeping Tom, “We, the People,” Pépé le Moko, Pepé Le Pew, Pepe the Prawn (Muppet), Pepi Katona (the slimy character in The Shop Around the Corner), and the Person from Porlock (see peeve).
Peter Pan, Wally Pipp, Gladys Knight and the Pips, “Pippa Passes” (“God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world”) , Pippi Longstocking, Louis “Pops” Armstrong, Poe, Pooh, “You can’t Pooh-Pooh Paducah, That’s Another Name for Paradise,” pop art, popcorn, Alexander Pope, Popeye, Popeye Doyle, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, the W. C. Fields movie Poppy, Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, and puppets.
You say, oh, the same thing could be claimed for any letter. You’re welcome to try.
pachyderm/pachysandra
What do an elephant and a “small genus of the family Buxaceae comprising procumbent subshrubs and perennial herbs with simple leaves and spikes of insignificant white or pinkish flowers, native to eastern Asia and eastern North America” (OED) have in common? Pachy is from the Greek for thick. Thick skin, in the elephant’s case. In pachysandra’s case, the reference is not to how well this visually benevolent plant (subshrub?) covers ground, but to the thickness of the male flower’s stamens. Strike you as sexist, to look at pachysandra and focus on its stamens? The sandra part derives from no woman’s name but from the Greek for male, as in androcentric. Now: what makes a flower “insignificant”?
page turning
Now that there are so many e-alternatives to books made of paper, it dawns on me that the physical act of page turning—separating one leaf from the next (some people actually wet their fingertips to do this), and the next, and so on, and sometimes one leaf is slightly more or less wide than the next, or leaves may cling to one another, and sometimes you can flip leaves but other times you have to take two of them together between thumb and forefinger and rub until they separate, and often a good deal of fumbling is involved—where were we?
The act of proceeding through physical reading material—that is to say, through printed matter—may strike future generations as bizarre. (“Wait—one page is on the back of the previous page? What’s up with that?” “If you think the so-called mouse was clunky, imagine having to separate two razorthin sheets of paper, or leaves, over and over again, with your fingers.”) Someday, before I punch my last Scroll-ahead button, leafing may strike even me as bizarre. I wrote eight or nine books on a manual typewriter, and today I can’t conceive how anyone would begin to go about such a thing. (There was something called a platen, I recall, and you cranked paper in around it and when you struck keys, clickety clack, letters on the end of metal stalks would swing up and hit the paper—or, rather, would press an inky ribbon against the paper, a ribbon that would rise up just in time, unless it got tangled, and sometimes you’d strike more than one key at once and the metal stalks would get jammed together and your fingers would get inky trying to separate the keys, and don’t get me started on carbon paper … It’s a wonder I survived to tell the tale. But by thunder, me hearties, didn’t we bang out some prose?)
If page turning dies out, however, certain pleasures will die with it. I applaud a magazine article that jumps—from page 24 to page 78, say. That article has not been cut to fit just one hole, it has been allowed to continue in the back of the book, where it can loosen its tie and breathe.
And how about the suspense involved in turning a page. Turning it at a pace that blends your intention and the page’s resistance. Or turning several pages in unseemly haste, as I did when I came to this in the lower right-hand corner of a story in Vanity Fair:
She wore a silky maternity dress under a blue blazer … . After a while, she took off the jacket, and there were her CONTINUED ON PAGE 132
Do you think Vanity Fair did that on purpose? Anyway, I leafed and leafed and came at last to page 132, where I found the following:
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 74 arms with their hieroglyphic tattoos …
Yes, I did feel sheepish, especially since the lady was with child. (See gillie, girl.) But in the course of the leafing I was up. Maybe after all page turning is a natural pleasure—there is something distinctly engrossing about it. In the New Orleans zoo I watched a silverback gorilla perusing a flattened wad of brown paper. He would lift a flap of it, turn it over, study the other side of it …
pang
As you say it you can almost feel it, can’t you? Ernest Weekley, who knew pangs, derived the word from prong with the r lost, as in Frances evolving into Fanny. Current dictionaries, doubting that etymology, fall back on “of obscure origin.” But I like Weekley’s suggestion: “For ground-sense of constriction, cf. anguish, angina.” Those two words, as well as anger and Latin angere (to strangle), come from a PIE root *angg-, narrow. Is that what Weekley means by ground-sense? Is he suggesting that ang is sonicky? If he isn’t, I am. It tightens the throat, evoking, however distantly, “a sudden sharp spasm of pain which grips the body or a part of it,” as OED defines pang.
peeve
People, including me, love our pet peeves. And I stress our. When I sense a peeve about to come boiling up at me from an audience, I pray it isn’t one to which I must frankly respond, “No, the truth is, I like snuck” or “Well, as far as gone missing goes, I can’t think of any expression that expresses the meaning meant to be expressed, uh, as well as gone missing does, actually.” Which will cause the bearer of the peeve in question to look at me as if I had just said, “No, in point of fact, I can’t see anything much about
your baby that is what I would call cute.”
What we can all agree on, I think, is that peeve is a word that sounds just right. Across, we might imagine, between pique and skeeve.
The adjective, peevish, came first. OED says it may derive ultimately from Latin perversus, but then again (hold on to your hat):
An alternative suggestion links the word to classical Latin expavidus startled, shy (< ex- + pavidus PAVID adj.) via an unrecorded variant with -ai- of Middle French espave (of an animal) stray, (of a person) foreign, (as noun) lost property, flotsam (1283 in Old French; French épave). The semantic connection is thought to be the behaviour of stray animals.
OED gets like that sometimes. When you click on pavid, the first definition is from my seventeenth-century forebear Thomas Blount’s Glossographia: “fearful, timerous, quaking, starting.” The original sense of peevish, at any rate, is “perverse, refractory; headstrong, obstinate; capricious, skittish; (also) coy.” OED’s first example, which I will be so bold as to convert into modern spelling, is from Piers Plowman, fifteenth century: “And bade him go piss with his plow, peevish shrew!” That’s not Piers calling the disrespecter of his plow a shrew, it’s the disrespecter calling Piers one—originally, a shrew could be male or female. A recent translation of that passage renders shrew as bastard.
Not until 1901 did peevish give rise to the verb peeve, meaning make peevish, or annoy.
Then in 1909 The Washington Post referred to “a fit of peeve.” Finally in 1917 we get “little pet peeve.” Don’t ever call someone’s pet peeve a little one. It’s like insulting somebody’s plow.